by John Lawton
“Sorry if my being here has come as a shock. I’ve not come to make any trouble for you. You’ve no doubt made a new life for—”
“Joe, I have but the shadow of a life. Call it new or old, it is a shadow.”
“But—you have a job?”
“Yes. Thanks to your friend Erno I have a job.”
“References?”
“Complete and convincing fakes from universities in Bonn, Zurich and Nottingham.”
“Nottingham?”
“If I’d put Cambridge somebody would know somebody. Nottingham. I’ve never been there and I’ve never met anyone that has. It might not even be a real place. Be that as it may … I am in Dublin. As surely as if you’d put me on the ship yourself with a ticket pinned to my lapel.”
“You did ask about your wife.”
“I did.”
“And?”
“You are familiar with the totalitarian designation ‘non-person’? I am a ‘non-husband.’ ”
“So, she divorced you?”
“Actually no. We are ‘legally separated.’ And I’m not at all sure I know the difference between that and divorce.”
“Me neither.”
“Meanwhile my wife lives with our daughters down in Killiney, and I live in a bedsit in Mountjoy I would not grace with the word squalid.”
“Not well-paid by Trinity?”
“I’m a tutor, Joe, not a lecturer. I’m paid by the hour and by results, rather than the quality of my contribution to the culture—which is close to zero by the bye.”
Wilderness felt he was being blamed for Bernard’s plight. For the afterlife, the half-life of the spy exposed. Not one shred of his conscience—an otherwise vital organ—felt any blame.
“And I live in one room next to this pub. A clean, well-lighted place but just one room all the same. Meanwhile my wife is at home in Hampstead with my daughters.”
“Is this where you say touché?”
“No Bernard, it’s where you say snap.”
§93
The problem Wilderness now faced, as he saw it, was not so much avoiding Bernard or keeping him at arm’s length but containing him. Of course Bernard would keep their secret—he’d kept his own for fourteen years after all—it was a matter of Wilderness keeping his in the face of Bernard’s curiosity. That he’d not been a spy for eight years had perhaps diminished his spy’s natural nosiness; it hadn’t killed it off. Sooner or later they’d run out of small talk and large talk would leap in to fill the gap.
Wilderness tried the tactic he’d used on Kostya, avoiding idle and not-so-idle conversation by focussing his mind elsewhere.
“Do you play chess, Bernard?”
“You know where I grew up. What do you think?”
“Fine. Friday at seven? The Shelbourne bar? I’ll bring the set.”
On Fridays and occasional Sundays they’d meet, sometimes in Davy Byrne’s, sometimes in Gladys Fitzsimmons’s kitchen, mostly at the Shelbourne. They’d play chess and Wilderness would lose.
Unsurprisingly, Czech turned out to be yet another of Bernard’s many languages, and whoever lost the draw for black or white chose the language they’d play in. French, German, English … anything but Russian.
By late February the rust and dust were out of his head and he began to win the odd game. Perhaps one in four. Losing seemed to reinvigorate Bernard, and often as not he came out of his corner chess-fighting fit.
Tonight, Good Friday, in the Shelbourne, in German, Wilderness was getting his arse kicked.
Bernard had dazzled him with moves long thought-out and quickly executed.
“I will say, Bernard, you’re quite the toughest opponent I’ve ever had.”
“Ah,” the voice down to a whisper, even though the buzz in the Shelbourne would smother a cry of “murder!” in any language.
“Have you ever played a Russian before?”
“I played Yuri Myshkin. Long before he was a general. Back in the days when we might still pretend to be allies.”
“Did you beat him?”
“Occasionally. But if I lost he’d always explain why I lost. He was determined I should learn from him.”
“Before I was even five years old, I learnt from the best. Nastasya Filipovna Krasnaya. I could play chess almost before I could read. Something about the child’s mind, I suppose.”
“You knew Krasnaya?”
“You could say that.”
“I met her once.”
Bernard’s hand hesitated over a white knight—put the move on hold. Wilderness could swear he was raising an eyebrow at this.
“May I ask when?”
“Nineteen forty-eight. You’d be worming your way into the British War Office about then.”
“I shall do my utmost not to take offence at ‘worming.’ I imagine this was in Berlin?”
“Yes. The summer before they pulled me out. Yuri and I were running contraband into the East. Coffee mostly.”
“And what did you make of her?”
“I had very little to go on. A thirty-second encounter in which I, a corporal, thought it best to stand to attention in the presence of a general. Albeit one of your generals, not one of mine. It was a bit like meeting a mythical creature, I suppose. Zhukov was real and I never set eyes on the man. Sokolovsky was real, and I met him more times than I can count. Krasnaya was unreal, in the way the woman in Déjeuner sur l’herbe would be unreal if she got dressed and stepped out of the frame to say hello. I thought she looked like an older version of the poster. Statuesque might be the word. The fire-engine red of her hair in the poster was just that, poster paint, but I’d always assumed she was a real redhead, and there was still a glint of gold in her hair even in ’48. I suppose she’d be about fifty? You know the poster I mean, the one with the machine gun and the baby? And a slogan like ‘Up the Workers.’ ”
“I don’t think we were ever as crude as that. ‘Forward with the People’ seems more probable. But yes, it rings a bell. Mate, I believe.”
The knight was picked up and plonked down. Lost again.
“I’m a sucker to say this, but same time on Sunday?”
“Ah no. It’s Easter. I have visitation rights this coming Sunday. No—that’s too formal. No one, no court has granted me the right to see my children. It’s an accommodation I have reached with my wife.”
“But … no reconciliation as yet?”
“Tell me, Joe. Do you have secrets from your wife?”
Bernard’s palm went up like a traffic cop before Wilderness could draw breath.
“Of course you do. What spy could possibly tell his wife everything. You tell her what you can and hope she never asks about the rest. But at least she knows you’re a spy. Kate knew nothing. As far as she was concerned, I was a former RAF pilot, of Canadian birth, doing rather well for himself and for his family in the British civil service. Everything she thought I was and everything she thought our marriage was unravelled in the course of one twenty-minute conversation in 1959. She is accommodating, but unforgiving. I take tea with her and my daughters. I do not dine with them, I do not stay overnight. It’s all very restrained, very civilised and as false as the name she now lives under. As she put it so succinctly when I turned up in Ireland in ’65, ‘Your one big lie has forced me into a thousand little ones. My every waking moment is a lived lie.’ ”
“But she didn’t turn you in.”
“No. She didn’t—or you and I would both be in prison.”
Thwaite sprang too easily to mind.
“Well … one more fuckup and I might be.”
Bernard did not ask what he meant.
“You have daughters, don’t you Joe?”
“Joan and Molly. Twins. They’re nearly three now.”
“Mine are Beatrice and Cordelia. Teenagers. In fact, Beatrice will be going back to England in the autumn to her mother’s old college, Girton. Why don’t you come to Killiney with me on Sunday? Deliver the Easter eggs. I’d like you to meet my girls. It mi
ght be an incentive.”
“An incentive to what?”
“To miss nothing. I didn’t set eyes on my daughters for nearly seven years. The years I spent in Wormwood Scrubs. I missed most of their adolescence. They had changed from girls into young women and I missed it because I’d given my life to a cause. No cause was worth that. Yours or mine. And … an incentive to get out as soon as you can. Whatever mission is planned that requires you to be cramming Czech … make it your last. Or end up playing at being a father on alternate Sundays. I hardly saw my mother after the age of twelve. My girls saw nothing of me after the age of eight. It’s no way to live.”
“Is your mother still living, Bernard?”
“I believe so—but in Russia. What’s Russia to me? The forbidden country.”
“I gave you your chance to go back.”
“And you gave me a bigger chance—not to go back. Let’s not get into blame. Will you come?”
Wilderness decided he would meet Bernard’s daughters, but silently prayed Bernard never met Judy. Ideas like his could make her impossible to live with.
§94
Time had not been kind to Kate Alleyn, née Caladine, now Howard. But then, Bernard Alleyn had not been kind to Kate Alleyn.
Wilderness remembered her picture in the papers when Bernard had been arrested in 1959. The cheaper papers, the ones Burne-Jones would “not have in the house,” had made a “thing” of her—“Married to a Russian Spy! How Could She Not Know?” He supposed she was younger than Bernard, perhaps thirty-two or thirty-three at the time, a flame-haired, second-generation Irish beauty. Some wives might have sued over the headlines. She had kept her silence. And lost her beauty.
At forty-five or so, the flames were dulled and her mouth lined and puckered by chain smoking. She was civil to Bernard but spoke entirely without warmth or curiosity over tea and hot cross buns. She asked Bernard no questions. She saved those for Wilderness.
Trying to give Bernard a few minutes alone with his daughters he had, helpfully he thought, carried cups and saucers back to the kitchen—and she turned on him—a sotto voce hiss.
“What are you doing here?”
“I’m sorry?”
“You’re one of them. You have to be. He’s never brought anyone before.”
“I’m a student at the university. I’m a friend.”
“He doesn’t have any friends!”
“Bernard and I play chess together a couple of times a week. I have two daughters. He wanted me to meet his.”
“Bollocks. You’re a fucking spy. Are you one of theirs or one of ours? Don’t even bother to answer that. I don’t fucking care and I’m fed up of being lied to. Just stay away from my girls. It’s people like you who ruin lives.”
An uneasy fifteen minutes followed before Bernard led Wilderness back to the bus stop.
Bernard was saying nothing. Perhaps it had not gone well. Perhaps it never went well. Beatrice and Cordelia had been lively and chatty—Beatrice especially when she learnt that Wilderness had studied modern languages at Cambridge. They seemed to work around the stony presence of their mother, not oblivious to it but not letting it be their cue. All the same it seemed to Wilderness that they existed stranded in the chasm between their parents, between truth and lies. Wilderness felt that he’d been shown a vision by the Ghost-of-Christmas-Yet-To-Come. The ruined life that people like Bernard could create. People like him.
§95
Something in the encounter with Kate Caladine continued to nag him.
He called his wife.
“Are you enjoying Dublin, Wilderness?”
“Sort of. But I think I need something with bigger bollocks.”
“Well … you always have.”
“Whatever comes up next has to have it.”
“Isn’t bollocks plural?”
“I’d moved on from bollocks to it—the indefinable it. The sort where you either have it or you don’t.”
“Oh … like the It girl?”
“Exactly.”
“Well … whatever this it is … make sure it’s your last.”
“Eh?”
“You’re forty this year. A bit old for playing Bulldog Drummond or Richard Hannay. So make the Czech job your last.”
And they had, with such ease, readily reached the point of the call. And the cards he thought he had held in his hand turned out to be in Judy’s.
“That,” he said. “That’s … what Bernard says.”
“Bernard? Bernard says? Bernard who?”
“Bernard Alleyn.”
“You mean he’s there?”
“Yep. Teaches in the department in which I study.”
“Bloody hell. Does Dad know?”
“Of course not. He wouldn’t want to know.”
“Do you and Alleyn speak?”
“Yep. In fact we play chess a couple of times a week.”
“Y’know, Wilderness mine, the world in which Dad moves has had me puzzled all my life. But the world in which you move has me utterly baffled. When is your enemy not your enemy? It’s like a numbum.”
“What?”
“Conundrum. My sister Eliza could never pronounce it when she was little. Same with linoleum. Linoleum was always yoeyyoeyum, and conundrum was numbum. It was the sort of thing you got on a souvenir mug or a china plate … ‘As I was going to St. Ives I met a man with seven wives … seven wives with seven sacks blah blah blah … and all his kids and all his fucking pigs’ … and then it asks you, ‘how many were going to St Ives?’ Numbum. You know? When is a door not a door? When it’s ajar. When is a lamp not a lamp? And so on. When is your enemy not your enemy? When you play chess with him?”
“How many pigs?”
§96
Prague: Late May the Same Year, 1967
Pleasingly Warm, with Passing Clouds
The KGB were onto Ben Crosland and he knew it. He’d done the last pickup quite certain he’d been followed from the minute he left the embassy. In fact, the only way he’d got away with it was not to pick up at all. Whatever Tibor K had left for him in the gents’ lavatory at the Café Dodo would stay there until K retrieved it. He turned an assignation into a stroll, walked a circuitous route back to the embassy, during which, in less than two miles, the KGB changed his tail twice. The last bloke was little, plump, pale—a passing resemblance to the Austrian actor Oskar Werner—overdressed for the weather, far too conspicuous in his belted leather jacket and flat cap; the uniform of an apparatchik.
Perhaps it was too risky for the Head of Station (Prague) to be his own courier, but they were understaffed, currently without a Second Secretary, and in Lord Brynmawr had an ambassador who seemed to have no handle on “Intelligence” whatsoever. There was no one he’d willingly trust with the job.
“I’ve been rumbled,” he said to his wife over dinner.
“Then—” She paused. “—Then you have to stop.”
“I can’t. It’s too important. The most I could do would be to pass it down the Service chain.”
“What? You mean one of those arses who play at being your Third Secretary? I wouldn’t trust either of them to go out and buy me a bloody Mars Bar.”
Sarah Crosland despised most of the men Ben had ever worked with, seeing them, perhaps rightly, as public school and Oxbridge dimwits who regarded a diplomatic career as a hereditary right, happily free from the burden of work or thought. Ben was Chelmsford Grammar and Manchester University—facts which concerned him far less than they concerned his wife.
“I’ll do it,” she said.
“What?”
“I’ll do the pickups.”
Where another husband might have replied “Nonsense, darling,” Ben said, “How?”
“Well … first things first … we have to throw them off the scent. You go out as usual for the next run. But we change the venue by whatever means you have of communicating with your man. Go to the Dodo, have a coffee, pretend to check out the gents. Dawdle all the way home. Give them plent
y to see. Meanwhile I take Jessica out in her pram and do the pickup at a bench in the Kampa Park—one with a clear view all around so I can see whichever bastard is lurking. If you can give me a thumbnail sketch of the tails you’ve spotted, all the better.”
“There’ve been three so far. As the Czech government gets weaker and more vulnerable to change the Russians may well draft in men. But.”
“But what?”
“Jessica? In her pram? Sarah, she’s five months old. Do you really want to risk—”
“Of course I don’t want to risk anything, but do you honestly think they’ll pounce on a woman with a baby? What kind of people are they?”
He knew very well what kind of people the KGB were, but refrained from saying so. Once she’d got the bit between her teeth, Sarah was all but impossible to dissuade.
It went like clockwork. Late on Wednesday afternoon Ben set off for the Café Dodo, spotted his tail straightaway and noticed no switches.
Ten minutes later Sarah wheeled the pram out of the embassy, attracting the attention of no one except the habitual, and hence ineffectual, StB appartatchik who watched the gate, and blended into the steady stream of pedestrians.
In the Dodo, down by the Legií Bridge, Ben had two coffees—more caffeine than he really needed at that time of day, but he wanted at least two men to use the gents before he went in for the pretence of a pickup. With any luck the Russians would follow one or both of the poor sods who’d pissed out of time and chance and it would be half an hour or more before they learnt the meaning of “red herring.”
A quarter of a mile from the embassy in the Palác Thun, “Oskar Werner” took over and, with a diligence worthy of a British nanny in Kensington Gardens, saw him to the door.
“Went like a dream,” Sarah said as she plonked a Minox film cartridge on his desk. “Your chap left his newspaper on the bench. I read bits of it for about ten minutes. Pocketed the film. Rocked the pram with my free hand, and Jessica slept through it. I saw no one I thought might be a Russian and no one approached me. If they had, I’d have woken the poor darling up and insisted she take the tit there and then. Guaranteed to put any bloke right off.”
